Sunday Reading

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This piece in the NYT was clearly written with Google's open approval, and that means one thing: Google is using the Times to talk with the folks on Madison Ave - and Wall St. And I have no doubt those folks are reading - closely. Though the issues of data privacy and Google's opaqueness are addressed, it still reads as something of a valentine. But with numbers like Google has, it's hard to see how it wouldn't be. There are tidbits in here that mark new comments from Google (at least to a major media outlet) on a number of topics, from Google Base to Google's AdWords optimization techniques to privacy. There's also a bunch of history. From the piece: This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner..... ...Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. ...HIDDEN behind its simple white pages, Google has already created what it says is one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems ever built. In a fraction of a second, it can evaluate millions of variables about...

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